Words by Jimmy Glinster
Out Now
PLEASE NOTE. THE EP WAS SENT IN DIGITAL FORM AND NOT IN THE CORRECT ORDER OF SONGS
It’s not too often you get an email at 5:30 in the morning asking if you want to do an EP review, and to be honest it was the last thing I had on my mind at that time on a Queensland winter morning when the temp has hit single digits. So, I fuck around all morning contemplating this offer as I cook pancakes and bacon for breakfast before taking a quick spa to raise my body temperature and try and relieve the “arthritis” in my wrist.
Anyway, it’s now almost 12 hours later so I’ll stop sulking about our very mild sub-tropical climate, but you’ll need to bare with me as I grab my new Heavy hoodie to deal with another drop of temperature as the sun goes down. (Support Aussie Metal and buy one of those fuckers you good c@nts!)
As I press play on this EP I realise that I know fuck all about this band, and I haven’t even taken the time to read their bio which could either be a good thing by removing the possibility of any pre-conceived bias or a bad thing because fuck knows what Krispy has thrown me into after an all nighter on tour with a US hair metal band.
Irreparable however are not a glam metal band, and they are not the ones responsible for keeping Krispy up ‘til all hours of the morning. That’d be The Midnight Devils but more about them in the next issue of Heavy.
This band is hard to put a finger on as the album commences with a disturbing mix of synth and some kind of tribal drums. Even more disturbingly some very somber gothic style vocals drift hauntingly over the random mix of noise. This goes on for a couple of minutes before I’m all of a sudden listening to some kind of black metal. I say black metal very loosely as it is ever so slightly over-powered with industrial style double kicks and what sounds like programmed drums. This is some weird shit, and this song still has 4 or so minutes to go.
The craziness continues for at least 3 of those 4 minutes before the track winds itself back down to where it began as a Searing Lustre. Interesting.
The following track Retribution I – Through the Abyss spends no time fucking around as it kicks off as dooming black metal. Again though, I’m not even sure it’s black metal because I know fuck all about black metal, and I don’t really care enough about the genre to be any kind of expert. It’s not death though, as it’s too dark and repetitive. The electronic drums stand out again in this track, especially during the double kick sections in the songs interlude which somewhat appear to be humanly impossible. I do apologise if this is a real drummer, but it doesn’t sound that way.
Next up is Retribution II – Salvation which takes a little longer to get going after a synth intro complete with siren-esque female vocals hovering over a slow techno beat. In fact, I’m now three minutes in and it still hasn’t got going, it’s just had some of those earlier heard sorry ass gothic vocals appear over the top of it. The randomly strummed, heavily reverberated guitar chords are a nice touch, as is the Casio keyboard solo/melody towards the end of the track.
More synth and programmed drums, followed by a grooving distorted bass line lead the way into Soulless which is a much softer track with more of an industrial rock vibe. It’s almost got an Orgy type vibe to it with its heavily affected guitars, synth overdubs and straight up 4/4 drumbeat. It’s a complete shift from the black metal earlier in the EP however it does follow suit with the previous track. A little over half-way through the track the pace picks up with some rolling tom fills before slowing back down with some very heavy synth guitars. I was expecting at this point that the song might slip back into the bands darker side, but it does the exact opposite and shifts back to the original format and feeling of the track before degrading into some kind of blackened white noise.
Fractured Essence almost perfectly describes how this song starts. It’s black as fuck, and then it’s not, and then it is … and so on, until it is again. Once the band finishes fucking around the song is straight up black metal, until it’s not, until it starts sounding like some type of tribalistic satanic chant. Did I just make up a word? Turns out I didn’t, but I did manage to spell it correctly, even though I misused it … I’m just gonna leave it there though as I listen to that black noise ring out the end of the EP, and then some bloke randomly rambling some words.
Well, that was quite the adventure …
